English Semantics

Combinations of paralanguage and gestures can communicate something about the mood of the speaker—anger, boredom, nervousness, elation, for instance—and actors work hard to achieve such effects in interpreting the characters they play. But each actor strives to do so differently. We are not impressed by a budding starlet who uses the same inventory of mannerisms as a seasoned actress. Other facets of appearance—clothing, hair style, jewelry, cosmetics, facial hair and what is done with it—have an effect on others, intentional or not. The distance between interlocutors and whether they touch each other or not depends on tacit standards that each of us learns from the culture in which we grow up. Whether we sit on the floor or on chairs, cross our legs at the ankles, over the knees, or not at all—these ‘say’ something about a person’s cultural background but they do not communicate semantically.

Just as we learn a language early in life and largely take it for granted, so we also learn these more peripheral elements of communication and, unless we move into a different society, we assume that they are ‘just natural.’ But gestures, interpersonal distances, the ways the voice is used can be quite different in different societies and thus any of these can have different effects on people of different backgrounds. What is meaningless or mild in one culture may be rude, obscene, or otherwise over-effective in another. Thus a face-to-face communication event contains linguistic and non-linguistic elements like these:

Linguistic:
vocal and verbal—words put together to form utterances (representing sentences)
vocal and non-verbal—prosody, the intonation and accenting with which utterances are spoken

Non-linguistic:
vocal—paralanguage, the “tone of voice”
non-vocal—distances maintained; appearance; gestures; silence.